Migrating cooperative portlets that use the IBM Portlet API

The term cooperative portlets refers to how portlets on a page interact by sharing information. One or more cooperative portlets on a portal page can automatically react to changes triggered by an action or event in a source portlet. Portlets that are targets of the event react to the trigger so that users are not required to make repetitive changes or actions in other portlets on the page. Portlets on a page can cooperate even if they were developed independently, without the programmer's awareness of the existence of the other cooperative portlets.

IBM^® WebSphere^® Portal Express allows portlets on different pages to communicate. To wire cooperative portlets requires administrative setup. In addition, portlets using Struts or JavaServer Faces, as well as portlets using the standard portlets APIs, can use the cooperative portlets features.

The steps for migration depend on the pbportlet.jar version that is used by the application. Applications that package more recent versions of the pbportlet.jar might require no changes when migrating to the current version. Applications that package older versions of pbportlet.jar might require manual migration steps to update the WAR file to support cross-page portlet communication. For example, an application that packages the pbportlet.jar version 5.0 requires manual migration if the application is deployed in the current version.

Migrate cooperative portlet applications that used previous versions of the pbportlet.jar file.

In the current installation, locate pbportlet.jar in the portal_server_root/pb/lib directory.
Copy the pbportlet.jar files from the portal_server_root/pb/lib directory to the WEB-INF/lib directory of the cooperative portlet application that you are migrating.
Overwrite the JAR files if they already exist.